CHARLES SCOTT MONCRIEFF was used to living in the shadows. As a gay man in Britain at a time when homosexual acts were illegal he kept his fleeting relationships quiet. As a spy working in Mussolini’s Italy he moved from place to place. And as a writer he found fame not in his own right—by his own admission, he was a second-rate poet—but as a translator of Marcel Proust.

“Chasing Lost Time” is the first comprehensive biography of Scott Moncrieff. Written by his great-great-niece, Jean Findlay, it sheds light on an “elusive, swift-minded and faun-like” man. In doing so it also describes the genesis of one of the definitive translations of the 20th century.

Born into a well-to-do Scottish family in the late 19th century, Scott Moncrieff was taught French by a Belgian nanny until the age of three. By the time he was 13, he was winning prizes for translation at his English boarding school. Ms Findlay uses previously unseen archival materials—including a suitcase of unread letters, diaries and notebooks from her great aunt’s attic—to evoke the Edwardian era in which Scott Moncrieff grew up.

Ms Findlay describes his life at Winchester College, where he was reprimanded for circulating a story that touched on homosexuality, and as a young man at Edinburgh University. As a soldier in the first world war he wrote home describing the idiosyncrasies of the French people he met and evoking the sound of shells as having “a song of their own like wasps”. He was a friend of Noël Coward, a satirist, and may have been a lover of Wilfred Owen, a war poet.

But the most enthralling parts of the biography describe his work as a writer. In 1919, after returning to London with a leg that had been badly broken by a British shell during fighting at Arras, he began to translate Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu”. By 1929 he had translated seven volumes—and was kept from the eighth and last only by his death from stomach cancer, aged 40. (This final volume was translated soon afterwards by Sydney Schiff, another Briton.) Scott Moncrieff’s translation would go on to influence writers such as Virginia Woolf, who described reading it as an erotic experience, and James Joyce. Joseph Conrad declared Scott Moncrieff’s version to be better than the French original, and F. Scott Fitzgerald called it a “masterpiece in itself”. Proust, who died in 1922, appeared pleased with the part of the translation that he saw (though unhappy with Scott Moncrieff’s Shakespearean title, “Remembrance of Things Past”). A new translation did not appear until the 1980s; for most of the 20th century, readers of English would have perused Proust’s novel in Scott Moncrieff’s translation.

Unlike Proust, who wrote “a slow exploration in search of lost time”, Scott Moncrieff was “actively chasing time”, argues Ms Findlay. He lived off a diet of coffee and wine and was continually working: he started properly translating Proust while working for Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Times, and continued while working as a sub editor. In 1923 he was recruited by the British intelligence service and moved to Italy, where he used his writing as a cover while reporting back about military manoeuvres, naval bases and Brits with suspected Fascist sympathies.

As well as Proust, he translated Luigi Pirandello, an Italian writer, despite claiming unfamiliarity with Italian, and Stendhal, a Frenchman whose short sentences were a relief after Proust’s sprawling prose. He translated Proust in cafés surrounded by raucous Italians or on holiday with friends, reading portions of the text aloud to them and mulling over his exact words.

Lydia Davis, an American writer who translated the first book of “À la recherche du temps perdu” for Penguin in 2003 describes Scott Moncrieff’s version as “dressy”, and other critics have griped over the romantic flourishes and anachronisms the Scot added to the Frenchman’s prose. Ms Findlay does not set out to counteract these criticisms, but to present the context within which Scott Moncrieff was writing. Mostly she succeeds, though at times even she can seem rather swept up by her great-great-uncle’s comings and goings and the complexity of his sex life. Still, the book is for the most part a fascinating read. After all these years, Scott Moncrieff can step out of the shadows.